In the throes of a professional crisis that devolves into a personal one, millennial black woman in finance Lesego breaks down in her mother’s car. In-between sobs, she murmurs entreaties not to be taken back to the luxurious Joburg apartment by her overbearing mother.
For the protagonist of filmmaker Karabo Lediga’s feature film, Sabbatical, the moment ensnares the pair into an uncomfortable living arrangement, pitting their personalities and beliefs against each other.
The film and Lesego’s character were developed by Lediga after she had a medical procedure that came with a six-week post-operation recovery period. “I left home at 16 years old,” she said in an interview. “I never really came back home because I was working and partying up a storm in Joburg. The surgery meant that I had to be home because I was living alone.”
For her recovery, Lediga said she was “smothered” with all the love, care, worry and medical assistance that her mother, a retired nurse, could give her. That notwithstanding, Lediga felt like a foreigner not only in her maternal home, but also an outsider in the type of community that had nurtured her upbringing.
“The idea comes from the expectations of a generation that went through apartheid,” Lediga explained. “Their dream was to give the next generation opportunities they didn’t have. In my reading of it, the opportunities were never about community.”
In Sabbatical, the conflicts that inevitably arise between Lesego, played by Mona Monyane, and her mother Doris, brought to life by Clementine Mosimane, become allegorical clashes between two sequential generations and their learnt and adopted values.
Lesego having been successful in her career, has come at the cost of her ability to build and maintain a community, while her mother’s reliance on her community for identity and self-worth is at odds with the unpredictability and treacherousness of modern life.
The film could have made more of an effort to further ratchet up the pressure and raise the stakes by depicting the increasing physical fragility of Lesego’s mother’s generation.
Age and the general (un)availability of suitable medical care for black people under apartheid meant that the following generation became increasingly responsible for their health and physical wellbeing. These cannot be easy realisations or smooth transferrals of responsibility.
US streaming giant Amazon Prime recently acquired exclusive streaming rights for Sabbatical across the Sub-Saharan African (SSA) region. This move was baked into the film’s production process and came after it premiered at the International Film Festival Rotterdam, held in the Netherlands, and enjoyed a two-week run on the SA cinema circuit.
Lediga and her team were aware of the risk of putting the film on the cinema circuit. “But I think it’s worth starting to revive that culture and these kinds of films have to be a start,” she said.
With Sabbatical and other contemporary SA films, some funding opportunities require that a partnership with a streaming service be secured at the onset of the film’s production. But for Lediga, the film being acquired for streaming across SSA opens an opportunity for its themes to resonate further than SA and makes room for earnest conversations to be had.
“It’s always about Africa,” she emphasised. “I like (working on) the African continent because we can have conversations about ourselves and see each other or see ourselves in each other’s work.”
As Sabbatical’s plot unfolds, there are moments where comments about migrant labourers and crime are made with a flippancy that has become everyday in SA. “We never see ourselves as the wrongdoers,” Lediga said. During the film’s SA premier, which took place on Mother’s Day at Montecasino in Joburg. The scenes elicited uncomfortable laughter and shifting in seats.
This and other topics that the film touches on increase the significance of it being made available for private viewing across SSA.
Sabbatical is a generational film that is set at a time and place that is relatable to many black SA millennials for whom the aspirations cast upon their lives by previous generations begin to show the cost of their pursuit.
Ideas of what home is, the cost of retaining or being forced to reestablish tenuous connections with it, and what that means for the types of people that this democracy has sought to produce, come into sharp focus here.
“Home is always described as this ideal, warm welcoming place where you can be yourself and be with community. But for a lot of us, it’s a very judgemental place.
“Can I arrive there as myself? Lesego arrives when it is a little bit too late. I don’t think she felt this is where I can lay my head and my problems and people will be accepting. Perhaps not wanting to deal with yourself; or maybe the stuff that made you.”
